Many enterprises now run applications in a distributed computing environment. Any problem that causes an enterprise's application to execute improperly may have a negative impact on business, and therefore, requires immediate analysis and resolution. An application may fail to execute properly for any number of reasons including code breaks, logical errors, configuration errors, resource issues, deployment issues, functional errors, logical errors and even application user errors. Analyzing and resolving problems with an application deployed in a distributed computing environment may be further complicated by application components and data spread over multiple computer systems, such as in a data center.
Because each system of a distributed computing environment that executes an application component or stores data generates a log file, log-file analysis tools have been developed to perform log parsing, log indexing, log searching, log filtering and reporting in order to try and identify application components that fail to execute properly. However, the results obtain from most log-file analysis tools are typically statistical in nature, such as number of tasks executed, which may be helpful in monitoring an application or application component but such results are not helpful in identifying problems that occur while running an application. In particular, certain problems that relate to running an application, such as user errors, logical errors, and functionality errors, are not readily identified by log-file analysis tools, because these types of problems are not predefined. Non-predefined problems are traditionally identified by statements from users that describe their actions and experience in interacting with an application and correlate user actions with the available log files, which is a time intensive process. Log-file analysis tools also do not help correlate run-time events between sub-systems of computing environment. In addition, a number of existing log-file analysis tools require log files to be generated in a particular format, which necessitates a change in the codes used to generate the log files. As a result, log-file analysis tools are typically only helpful in identifying predefined problems and cannot be used to identify problems that are not predefined. IT managers, and in particular IT managers of distributed computing environments, seek systems and methods that identifying application problems that are not predefined.